San Francisco

After a very arriving in LA at 6am in the morning Kraig picked me up and informed me that today was going to be busy. Well I was ready after not sleeping for basically a day we arrived at Kraigs house and worked on gliders all day long. It was a productive day with one complete rebuild unpacked 5 gliders took a sail off another one organized his new trailer with padding and loaded all the gliders up for the weekend. He let me finish work at 11pm that night and before I knew it the alarm was going off and it was time to make the 7 hr drive to San Francisco.This was set to be a fun trip with Phil Bloom, Chippy, Jay, Mike barber and Kraig’s family all going for a flying weekend. The drive was pretty boring and not a whole lot to see out the window apart from very dry landscapes. We arrived in San Francisco to a cold cloudy afternoon. I was now not feeling so great and was coming down with the flu. We all went out to the Castro for a Italian dinner of which I ate very little before returning home to the motel.

I became worse overnight and was not going to make it to the hill for a fly unless things improved. The weather was not great with cloudbase only 10 feet above launch it was making it difficult for anyone to fly. After spending quality time in the bathroom I decided that I should at least go to launch and get some fresh air as this weekend was the whole reason I came over 1 week early.

I arrived there to see a hill full of moyes gliders and people standing around waiting for cloud base to lift. Eventually it did and I even managed to have a quick fly before I started feeling bad and had to land. I did manage to break a few rules on my 10 minute flight but most of them seemed to like my rule breaking flying.

I managed to go out to dinner with everyone to a nice thai restaurant just down the road. Urs the new Moyes dealer there was super nice and paid for dinner, thanks Urs.

I returned back to the motel and for some reason went downhill again with another sleepless night. I woke up even worse and spent the entire day in the room trying to survive. I managed to get out of bed for a hour to see Ken brown and family that had come up to visit.

There was no flying today so I did not miss anything apart from a full belly which I had not since leaving Australia 4 days earlier.

The next day we returned to LA and managed to stop for a fly at Kagel as I had not yet tested my glider. Kraig and I had a short afternoon flight and then we met up with our Brazilian friend Konrad in the LZ. I hung out in LA for a couple of days working on gliders with Kraig before he took me to the airport enroute for Seattle.